API failures are inevitable; the important part is how quickly you
can react. Here are 4 common API failures, and how you can test
them.

Preventing and reacting to problems in your web services is something
every developer, QA analyst, and project manager should be
thinking about often. As web services grow they require more complex
types of testing, but there are a few fundamentals that should always
be covered in your automated API tests.

Invalid SSL certificates

It happens to the best of us: once a year an SSL cert expires and
error reports start rolling in from API clients. These types of
outages can be tough to track down and correct, so it's important to
monitor your APIs SSL certificates and be alerted of any failures.

SSL validation testing with Assertible

Assertible has
a core assertion to validate SSL every time a
test is run. If the validation of your certificate doesn't pass, the
AssertValidSsl core assertion will fail the test. This
is configurable per environment, so if your
production web service requires SSL, but your staging app doesn't,
you can configure your tests to only validate SSL in production.

Service provider outages

Sometimes it's not our
fault. Service providers go out too. A
web service becoming unreachable can cause widespread
issues. Monitoring your API with a ping can help spot these situations
fast.

Frequent health checks with Assertible

A basic request to test for 200 status codes is a good way to ensure
your service is reachable. You can add these tests to
a schedule on your web
service that runs on a given interval and alerts on any failures.

Too many redirects

Redirects in APIs and web applications are a part of how some services
work, but if something spins out of control you don't want Chrome
showing your users a TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS page instead of your app.

Enforce a redirect limit

The Max redirects setting on each test sets a
limit of the number of redirects the test's request can make. If it
exceeds that number, the test will fail. Any API or web app that
utilizes redirects, should have these cases tested.

Invalid payload formats

Sometimes applications return data in unexpected formats, like when a
JSON API responds with an HTML error page, and things start to go
wrong. It's important to validate your APIs response data, in
normal and error scenarios, so your clients don't start to fail.

Payload validation with Assertible

Assertible has a JSON validation and
an HTML validation assertion to test
the response of your API. Every time your test is run, the response
body will be checked and you will (hopefully!) see a passing
assertion:

Having your bases covered with these steps is good start to correctly
testing your APIs and web services. You
can join Assertible for free and get started today!